"Ally, you really don't have to see this, you know. Not if you'd rather . . . Nothing remotely like this is going to happen to you. They assured me."What the hell is he talking about?"On the other hand," he went on, "maybe you should see it. Maybe everybody in the world should see it. It's so astonishing."He pushed open the door and rolled her in. Then he reached down and lifted her to her feet. Standing wasn't that hard, and somehow he had known that.The room seemed to be captured in mist, though surely that was her imagination. Everything must be her imagination.Kristen was in the corner of the room, in a wheelchair, but now her body was shriveled. No, shriveled was not the right word. In fact, there might not be a word to describe the change. Her skin was smooth and flawless. She didn't look like this the last time Ally saw her and now she wondered how long ago that actually was. How many hours, or days?The bones were the same as always; in her cheeks the underlying structure was sharp and severe and elegant. But there wasn't enough flesh on them. They were reminiscent of what happens at puberty, when the body starts changing in ways that aren't well coordinated.That was it. Kristen had become a child—it was in her innocent eyes—except that her body was now the flesh of a child over the bone structure of an adult.It scarcely seemed like the same person from the last time. She had crossed some mystical divide. She was holding a large rag doll—where did she get that? Ally wondered—and humming the tune of the ditty that ended with "Now I know my ABC's. Tell me what you think of me.""She can't talk," Stone was saying. "I mean, actually communicate. Or at least she doesn't seem to want to. I've already tried. But isn't what's happened incredible? There's never been anything like this in history. The replacement cells are making her body newer and newer, so she's getting younger and younger."Ally walked over, slowly, and tried to take her hand. She was grasping the doll and she violently pulled back."Hey," she said, trying to muster a matter‑of‑fact air, "how's it going? Do you remember me?""I don't think she recognizes you," Stone said in a stage whisper. "I wish I knew more about the biology of the brain, but I think there's some kind of aggressive replacement of memory synapses under way. I think it's one of those LIFO things. Last in/first out. She's regressing chronologically, but in reverse. Maybe she's lost use of language, the way Alzheimer's patients do. I don't know."Ally felt herself near to tears. "Van de Vliet was going to use antibodies from me to try to . . . something.""That was always a long shot," he said. "But now the preliminary tests he's just done on you indicate that the level of enzyme in you can be controlled very accurately. He's very excited."She turned back to him. "How do you know all this?""I've become part of the story, Ally. That's not supposed to happen, but this is the only way to get it all firsthand. I have to live it. And guess what, I now know enough to write the book I've been waiting all my life to write. I have the punch line.""Which is?""Stem cell technology goes to the very origin of life, and it may turn out that for once Mother Nature can be fooled. Dr. Vee's venturing into areas now where even he doesn't know what's going on. Ally, what's happening in this room is the biggest medical story since . . . Nothing begins to compare."Stone had lost it. There was true madness about him now.She walked back over to Kristen and leaned over andkissed her. Kristen stared at her in unfocused confusion, but then she smiled."I'm alone in here. Will you take me outside? I want to find my mother."The voice was that of a five‑year‑old and it sent a chill through Alexa. The "grown‑up" memory cells in her brain had been replaced by blanks. It was "last in/first out" and thirty‑plus years of life experience were being replaced with brand‑new nothingness.The Syndrome. Time had to move in one direction or the other. The body either went forward or in reverse. There was no equilibrium.Then she had a further thought. Winston Bartlett was not going to let this Beta disaster run to its natural conclusion— a horrifying exposure to the world. He was going to intervene. Kristen was not about to leave this room in her current condition. Either she left cured—which seemed wholly implausible at this point—or she departed in a manner that left no trace.Then yet another thought crossed her befuddled mind. She and Stone knew about Kristen. What does that mean for us?"Stone, we can't leave her here.""What are you proposing we do?" he queried. "Take her to an ER somewhere? Frankly, I don't know how you would describe her problem to an emergency room admissions staffer.""I'll think of something.""By the way, Ally, so you should know, she's wearing diapers. This is the real deal.""And how do you figure in all this?""I told you. I'm going to be the James Boswell of stem cell technology. I'm going to report on this miracle from the inside. But now, Ally, if the Beta procedure is going to succeed you have to be the one to make it happen."She looked at him, still stunned by the wildness in his eyes.And she had a feeling like her heart was being wrenched out."You're working with them, aren't you?" She was fuming with anger. She no longer knew who could be trusted. He'd taken leave of his senses. Or had his senses been taken from him? Which was it?"I'm thinking about you. And hopefully about us. You're being offered something you'd be a fool to turn down. That's all I have to say." He took her hand and helped her back into the wheelchair. Then he whispered, "Let's get out of here."He quickly opened the door and rolled her out into the empty hall. When he closed the door behind them, he whispered again. "Didn't you see the surveillance camera and microphone in there? There's one in the room where they had me locked up. They just put them in.""To watch Kristen?""And me. I heard Bartlett and Van de Vliet talking. If any of this Beta screw‑up with her gets out of this building, Bartlett's conglomerate is toast." He bent over near to her and continued whispering. "Listen, we don't have much time. They've got your procedure scheduled for later on tonight. I'm still somewhat of a zombie from something they gave me, but maybe I can help get you out of here. Let me tell you what I've found out so far. Van de Vliet gave you a low‑dosage version of the Beta procedure, in hopes he could harvest telomerase antibodies and use them on Bartlett. But there was only a trace. He did inject those into Bartlett, but he doesn't think it's enough to have any effect. So now Bartlett is demanding he give you a massive dose of telomerase. Van de Vliet is freaked about the risks, but Bartlett thinks it's his only chance to head off having what happened to Kristen happen to him too. However, what Bartlett doesn't know is that Van de Vliet has just finished a new computer simulation and he thinks he's finally figured out how to do a successful Beta procedure. For him, that's the Holy Grail.""How do you know all this?""I heard him talking to his assistant Debra. I was supposed to be sedated. The reason he wants to perform it on you is because he now has so much data on you, as a result of the first procedure. He thinks he's got a real shot at redemption. Ally, if he's calculated wrong, you could end up like Kristen.""What about you?" she asked. "You should get out too.""I should, but . . . Look, I've been trying to get in here for a long time. Now I'm finally in. You could say I'm under duress, but I'm here and this is where it's happening. If I get out alive, I have a hell of a story."Is he thinking clearly? she wondered. He seems to be drifting in and out of a mental cloud. What is wrong with him?"Stone, there's an emergency door on the first level of the basement. If we can get up there, we might be able to escape. And while we're doing it, you might want to seriously reconsider staying in this place. We've both seen Kristen. What makes you think they're planning on either of us ever living to tell that tale?""I'm having some trouble thinking just now." He was helping her out of the wheelchair. "But I do know you've got to disappear. Whatever plans they have for me remain to be seen, but I know exactly what's in store for you. So come on and try to walk. We can't use the elevator, but there's a fire door at the other end of the hall, which leads up to the lab floor."It's probably alarmed, she thought. Then what do we do?Walking was easier than she'd expected. The strength was rapidly coming back in her legs. But more than that, there was no sense of tightness in her chest as she might have expected. She was always aware of traces of stenosis, but now she felt nothing. Maybe there were miracles.The hallway was dimly lit, and she wondered, Is a surveillance camera tracking our every move?"Shit," Stone announced when they reached the fire door, "it's alarmed."That's exactly what I was afraid of, she thought."Any chance they're bluffing?""Don't think so." He pointed. "That little red diode says it's hot."God, she thought we've got to get out of here. "Maybe we could just make a dash for it?"He looked at her and shook his head. "Like you're in shape to dash? No, what's called for is stealth."He was pulling out his wallet. "The thing about these card readers, some of them, like those that get you into bank ATMs, sometimes will open for other cards. I've got four kinds of plastic. Might as well give them a try.""Well, just hurry." She leaned against the wall. "I'm starting to get weak."He slipped his Visa through and nothing happened. He immediately tried MasterCard. Again nothing."Maybe I should try my all‑purpose bankcard." He slipped a Chase plastic through, but once more nothing happened."This isn't working, Stone." She sighed, feeling her legs weaken as she clasped the wall. "I think we're going to have to chance the elevator.""Don't give up yet." He took out his American Express, kissed it and swiped it through. "One last shot."The red diode blinked off."Never leave home without it," she whispered."We will now proceed very, very quietly." He carefully pushed open the door, inches at a time.The stair had metal steps and was lit by a single fluorescent bulb. As he helped her up, Ally was wondering if there was any way to extract her mother too. She couldn't imagine how she could do it and besides, Nina might well refuse to go.No, just get out and make Stone understand that no way was Winston Bartlett going to let him go free to tell the story of Kristen. He clearly wasn't thinking with all cylinders.Stone Aimes was about to disappear, just like Kristen had.The entry to the laboratory level was also alarmed, but American Express once again saved the day. When they pushed open the door, however, the lights were on in the office at the far end of the hallway.Where's that door that Grant was going to use to get me out? she wondered. Then she saw a door markedexitnext to Van de Vliet's office.Shit, it's all the way at the opposite end of the hall."Stone, we have to get to that door before anybody sees us. I don't know if it's alarmed or not, but that's the ball game." She reached for his hand. "If we can get there and get out, please come with me. We can make it to the highway. You can't stay here.""Let's get you out. Then we'll talk.""I'll drag you if I have to."As they moved quietly along the wall, they could hear an argument under way. She recognized the voices as Ellen 'Hara's and Karl Van de Vliet's."I won't allow my staff to be part of this," Ellen was declaring. "I've seen Kristen. Any form of the Beta is dangerous. If you do anything involving that procedure again, you'll put everybody here at risk.""Don't you think I've thought about that, agonized about it? We have one chance to turn all this around. This is it.""I don't want to be involved and I don't want any of my people involved do you hear me?""Then keep them upstairs." He was striding out of his office, flipping on the lights in the hallway."Oh shit," Ally whispered. She opened a door and pulled Stone into the examining room, where her mother had first been admitted. Just as she did she heard the ding of the elevator and caught a glimpse of Debra andDavidVan de Vliet's senior researchers, getting off.When she closed the door, the room should have been pitch black. But it wasn't. A candle was burning on a counter and there was a figure at the far end of the room.He was sitting on the examining table, in the lotus position, his eyes closed."Are you ready?" Kenji Noda asked. "I think just about everyone is here now."Oh my God, Ally thought. What are we going to do?She watched helplessly as he reached over and touched a button on the desk. A red light popped on above the door. A moment later, it opened."What are you doing here?" Debra asked, staring at them."Getting some exercise," Stone said.Then Winston Bartlett appeared in the doorway behind her."How did they get up here?""Ally, I'm not going to let them do this to you," Stone declared, seizing her hand. "We're going to—""Ken, please get him out of here," Bartlett said. 'Take him back downstairs, anywhere.""You shouldn't be out of your wheelchair," Debra was saying. She turned to Ellen. "Would you get—""I'm not getting you anything," Ellen O'Hara declared. "I've just submitted my resignation. Effective three minutes ago. I don't know a thing about what's going on here and, from now on, I don't want to know."She got on the elevator and the door closed."Ken," Bartlett said, "first things first. Go after that woman. Don't let her leave the building."Now Debra was rolling in a wheelchair.Davidhad appeared also, deep disquiet in his eyes, and he helped her in."There's very little risk to this," he said. "Believe me."She felt him giving her an injection in her left arm.No, don't . . .As the room started to spin, she reached out and grabbed Stone’s arm and pulled him down to her."Downstairs," she whispered. "Look around. There's—"She didn't get to finish because Debra was whisking her out the door and toward the laboratory. Stone had just grinned confusedly, seemingly not paying any attention to what she was saying. Instead he ambled toward the open stair door and disappeared.At this point, however, no one appeared to notice or to care. They were rolling her through the steel air lock. On the other side, Winston Bartlett was already waiting, standing next to a gurney with straps.No!Chapter 34Friday, April 109:34p.m.She was still conscious asDavidand Debra lifted her onto the gurney. There was no operating table in the laboratory, but this procedure did not require one. It consisted of a series of small subcutaneous injections along both sides of the spine, followed by a larger injection at the base of the skull.As the injections began, she drifted into a mind‑set where she was never entirely sure how much was real, how much was fantasy, how much deliberate, how much accidental. She remembered that she felt her grasp of reality slipping away, but there was no sense of pain. Instead, images and sensations in a sequence that corresponded to the passage of time drifted through her mind. It was couched in terms of the people she knew.The first image was her mother, Nina, and they were together, struggling through a dense forest Initially, she thought they were looking for her father's grave, but then it became clear they were searching for some kind of magic potion that would save her mother’s life. As they clawed their way through tangled tendrils and dark arbors, she became increasingly convinced their quest was doomed, that she was destined to watch Nina pass into oblivion.But then something happened. The forest opened out onto a vast meadow bathed in sunshine. In the center was a cluster of snow‑white mushrooms, and she knew instinctively that these would bring eternal life to anyone who ate them."Come," she said to Nina, "these can save you.""Ally, I'm too old now. I don't want to be saved. There comes a moment in your life when you've done everything you feel you needed to do. You've had the good times and now all that's left is the slow deterioration of what's left of your body. It robs the joy out of living.""No, Mom, this is different," she said plucking one of the white mushrooms and holding it out. "This prevents you from growing any older. You'll stay just the way you are. You can have a miracle."“'To never escape this vale of tears? To watch everyone you love grow old and wither and die? Is that the 'miracle' you want me to have?" Then she looked up at the flawless blue sky and held out her arms as though to embrace the sun. "My mind Ally. You've given me back my mind. Now I can live out whatever more life God will see fit to give me and actually know who I am and where I am. That's miracle enough for me."As she said it, a beam of white light came directly from the sun and enveloped her. Then the meadow around them faded away and all she could see was Karl Van de Vliet, who was bending over her and lifting back her eyelids."Alexa, I can't tell you what you're about to feel, because no one has ever been where you're about to be. God help us, but we're on the high wire without a net here. But any new cell configurations should immediately form tissue that's a facsimile of what's already there. That's what the simulations show."She was listening to him, not sure if he was real or a dream. Then she heard Bartlett's voice."Why are you talking to her, Karl? She can't hear you.""We don't actually know whether she can or not. At some level I think she's aware of her surroundings. In a way we should hope that she is. If there are going to be impacts on her consciousness, I'd rather she be alert and able to remember what it was like."Then the voices drifted away, but she was sure she had no control over anything. The white mushrooms. She was thinking about them again. Only now they were above her and growing toward the sky and then she realized she was underground, buried and looking up from her own grave.What happened next was a journey through time—somewhere in the far‑distant future. She seemed to be watching it through a large window, unable to interact with what was happening on the other side.Time.She felt a sensation at the back of her neck and the images faded away."This damned well better be right" came a voice. "There's not going to be another chance.""I did an activity simulation for a range of antibodies, just to make sure she wouldn't automatically reject the enzyme because of the earlier injection." The voice belonged to Karl Van de Vliet Her mind was clearing and she recognized it "But all the results indicate that the effect of the antibodies is essentially washed out at this concentration of active enzyme. Have the good grace to let me try to get this right."She was listening and trying to understand what was going on. Her mind had been drifting through time and space, but now she was aware that something new was happening. The hallucinations, the conversations around her, all were beginning to focus in, to build in intensity.But that was not what was really happening; it was merely a mask over something that had entered the laboratory, some kind of force.Then her vision began to work in a strange way that felt more like a sixth sense. She was "seeing" what was going on in the room, even though her eyes were shut. Or perhaps they weren't. She didn't know and she was still strapped to the gurney, so she had no way to check."Kristy," Winston Bartlett said dismay in his voice, "you shouldn't be in here. You should be resting.""What the hell are you doing down here?" Van de Vliet demanded. The pitch of his voice had noticeably gone up.Who? Ally wondered. Who's he talking to?There are definitely new people in the room."Come on, Ally," said a voice in her ear, urgent. This time she knew who it was. It was Stone. "Damn them all. I'm getting you out of here. Now."Chapter 35Friday, April 1010:07p.m.She felt the straps on the gurney loosening and then she started prying her eyes open. She thought, hoped, it was Stone, but she couldn't see well enough to be absolutely sure. Her mind and her vision were still overflowing with horrifying nightmares of time gone awry. What did all those bizarre dreams mean?She was groggy but was coming alert. Perhaps it was the sense of electricity in the room, but something very unscheduled was going on.When she finally got her eyes open and focused, what greeted her was a blinding row of white lights directly overhead that seemed to isolate her. But there was tumult all around her in the lab, a cacophony of alarmed voices echoing off the hard surfaces of glass and steel. She squinted into the light as she felt Stone slip his arm around her shoulders and raise her up.Thank God, he's here, she thought."Come on," he was saying. "She's not interested in you. She just wants Kristen out of here. This is the only way.""Who . . . ?" She was startled by the sound of her own voice, mildly surprised to discover she was even capable of speech.She gazed around, trying to find her when . . . Jesus!Katherine Starr was standing next to Kristen. She was moving in a surreal way, gripping Kristen's hand and pulling her along.Stone had found her. He had understood. Katherine Starr appeared to be wearing a blue bathrobe under a gray mackintosh, but the part that got Ally's attention was the knife she was holding, glistening like a scalpel.No, itwasa scalpel, shiny and sharp as a razor.Tough luck, guys. No pistol this time, but she still managed to come up with a convincing substitute.She didn't look any saner than she did the last time. Now, though, she finally had what she'd come for. She had her daughter. Could it be that Kristen was about to be liberated? Had the world come full circle?"No." The voice belonged to Winston Bartlett. "I want her with me.""You 're the prick responsible for this." Katherine whirled on him, brandishing the scalpel."Mrs. Starr," Van de Vliet interjected, eyeing the sharp metal, "you can't take Kristen away now. She's at a very delicate stage of her procedure.""I seem to be doing a lot of things I can't," she declared turning back. "I'm not supposed to be out of my room, but I am. And now I'm getting us both out of here. We're going through that air lock and onto the elevator. So whose throat do I need to cut to do it?"Winston Bartlett was edging away, and his eyes betrayed he was more concerned than he wished to appear."Look at her," Katherine Starr continued shoving Kristen— who was completely disoriented her eyes blinking in confusion—in front of Van de Vliet. "She doesn't know me; she doesn't know anything. She's acting like a baby. What in hell have you done to her?""She had the procedure she wanted. At the time I warned there might be side effects we couldn't anticipate.""She's lost her mind. That's what you call aside effect?”All this time Kristen was just standing and staring blankly into space, but there were growing storm clouds welling in her eyes. It caused Ally to wonder what was really going on with her. Had this troubled girl been made permanently childlike, or was there a split personality at work? Did she have a new mind now, or a parallel mind?"We're still trying to stabilize her condition," Van de Vliet said in a soothing tone. "We just need a little more time."That was when Kristen wrenched free of her mother's grasp. Her eyes had just gone critical, traveling into pure madness. She strode over and seized a glass jar containing a clear solvent."I want them all to die," she said in a little girl's voice. "They're going to kill me if I don't kill them first."Now Katherine Starr had turned and was staring at her. "Kristy, honey, put the bottle down. I'm going to take you home. I don't know what he's done to you, but I'm not going to let you stay here anymore. You're coming with me."This is not going to end well, Ally thought. She began struggling to her feet, trying to clear her mind enough for an exit strategy.Nina was upstairs, or at least that was where she had been. Okay, the first order of business is to get her out. Stone could probably manage on his own . . .Now Kristen was walking over to an electric heater positioned on a lab workbench. She switched it on and the tungsten elements immediately began to glow. Then, still holding the bottle, she turned back to Van de Vliet."I see things that I never saw before. My mind has powers it never had till now."He nodded knowingly. "I always suspected that—""I'm able to think just like I did when I was little," she continued, cutting him off. "Sometimes I'm there, in thatworld. Then sometimes I flip back. But I can always tell when grown‑ups are lying to me. What did you do to my mind?""Kristen," Van de Vliet said "the brain has many functions that we still only barely understand. With the Beta procedure, we don't really know what activates general cell replacement or what the nature of the replacement tissue actually is. We're just at the beginning of a marvelous—""I'm seeing a future in which nothing exists," she muttered despairingly, still holding the glass bottle of solvent. "I don't want to be a part of it."Van de Vliet was staring at her, his eyes flooded with alarm. "What . . . what are you seeing, Kristen?""I'm seeing you dead." She glared around "All of you."Then, with an animal scream, she whirled and flung the glass liter bottle at the electric heater on the laboratory workbench. It crashed into the shiny steel case with a splintering sound followed by an explosion that sent a ball of fire and a shock wave through the room. In an instant the entire end of the lab was engulfed in a sea of flame.Ally sensed herself being knocked to the floor, but she also felt a surge of adrenaline. This was endgame, the moment when everybody found out who they were.A hand was gripping her like a vise. It was Stone's, but the blast had knocked him to the floor too and he was now motionless, slumped against the side of a laboratory bench. It was like she was being held in a death grip. Was she going to have to carry him out? She wasn't even sure she had the strength in her legs to get herself out.Now something even more horrible was slowly beginning to happen. The central part of the lab had several sets of steel shelving arranged in rows, and each supported a carefully organized arrangement of sample vials filled with some kind of organic solvent. She saw with horror that the first towering set of shelves, easily seven feet high, was slowly tipping from the force of the blast. It teetered for an instant and then fell into the set of shelves next to it with all the ponderous majesty of a giant sequoia.What happened next sounded like the end of the world. As the first set of shelves crashed against the second, like a row of massive steel‑and‑glass dominoes, each subsequent tower tipped and fell against the next, and on and on.All the while, as the tumbling racks were spewing flammable solvents across the smoky lab space, they were ripping out electrical wiring and sending sparks flying.The whole danger‑dynamic of the room had been turned upside down. Katherine Starr and Debra andDavidnow lay pinned beneath a tangled mass of angle‑iron supports that had collapsed in the wake of the falling shelves. All three appeared to be unconscious.Winston Bartlett was at the far end of the room. He'd been slammed against the wall by the force of the explosion but was pulling himself up. He seemed to be unhurt, though it was hard to see through the billowing smoke.Karl Van de Vliet was standing in the middle of the laboratory, his eyes glazed, flames and smoke swirling about him.What does this mean to him? Ally wondered. Years of research data being obliterated in an instant.But the horror wasn't over. The fire was depleting the hermetically sealed room's oxygen. Ally sensed that anybody who didn't get out of the lab in the next five minutes wasn't going to be going anywhere standing up.But what was happening with Kristen? She was walking through the flames as though on a country stroll. It was like the fires of hell were all around her and she was ambling through them unscathed. She must be experiencing third‑degree burns, Ally thought, yet there’s a sense that nothing can harm her. How could it be?And then an astonishing possibility began to dawn on her. With the stem cell enzymes working at full blast, was it possible her body was immediately replacing its damaged cells? Could it be that the telomerase enzyme didn't know the difference between a cell that had aged and one that had been damaged by its environment?"Jesus," Stone said, finally stirring, "what's—"At that moment the overhead lights flickered and died and the emergency lights clicked on, sending battery‑powered beams through the smoke."Christ, Ally," he declared gazing around still dazed as his consciousness seemed to be slowly returning. "We've got to get people out of here."There didn't appear to be a sprinkler system. Probably, she thought, because an onslaught of water would wipe out all the computers.Now she was thinking about the automatic air locks. How did those steel‑and‑glass doors work without electricity? Did they have a battery backup, or some kind of fail‑safe mechanism, which provided a manual override in case of a power outage?Now Winston Bartlett was striding toward the center of the room. From the dazed look in his eyes, it wasn't clear whether he knew where he was or not. Kristen was walking toward him, on a collision course."You let this happen," she said "You wanted to ruin my life.""Kristy, nobody made you do anything," he said choking from the smoke. "But now we've got to—""It's too late," she declared lashing out with the side of her hand against his neck. He staggered back, flailing, and seized an iron girder.There was a blast of voltage, a shower of sparks, and he screamed as he crumpled sideways. Then the force of his fall broke his hand loose from the electrical short. He lay prostrate on the smoky floor of the lab, twitching.My God, Ally thought, she really is determined to kill us all before she's through."Kristen," Van de Vliet was saying, "please. There's still time. I'm going to do everything I can for you."He was gasping for air and now more vials of flammable liquid were exploding from the heat and igniting. He turned and stumbled toward the air lock. There were sounds of yelling on the other side.The people outside can't get through, Ally realized. The security lock has no override.We 're going to die.Van de Vliet pounded on the button controls of the air lock, but there was no response. Smoke was billowing around him and he choked, coughing and dropping to one knee.Then Kristen walked up behind him. She appeared not to notice the flames and smoke swirling around her."This is where you get what's coming, you bastard. I warned you you'd better do something for me. But you never really intended to help me. I was just an experiment. That's all I ever was. For both of you. You fuckers." And she lashed out with a powerful fist, sending him to the floor.Outside there was now the wail of a siren, the sound faintly filtering through. And the pounding on the other side of the air lock continued, though now it had the force of authority.At last, Ally thought, somebody finally got serious and called the fire department.Now Kristen had bent over the prostrate Van de Vliet and was doing something, though Ally couldn't tell what."Keep your face close to the floor," Stone was yelling. "It's where the last of the air is. Hang on. We'll be okay."She had a premonition they were not going to be okay. They all were going to suffocate.All, that was, except Kristen. She seemed to possess some magic immunity from the horrors around her. She had risen and was standing over Van de Vliet like a statue, while everybody else was on the floor.As Ally watched her—a serene figure in the middle of chaos and death—she began to have an odd sensation. The burning in her lungs, from the smoke, started to dissipate. And strength felt like it was pouring into her limbs. The tongues of flame around her had become dancing white figures that invited her to rise and join them.She did, slowly, not quite knowing what she was doing. Then she walked to the jammed air lock. She stepped over Karl Van de Vliet's collapsed frame and placed her hands on the steel. It was already scalding, but she only took fleeting notice of that.While a firefighter's ax futilely pounded on the outside, she seized the wide bar of the door and ripped it open, to the sound of wrenching metal.It was a superhuman effort she didn't realize she was capable of. And it was the last thing she remembered. The space around her had become a blazing white cloud and she didn't feel the hands of the two firefighters who seized her as she fell through the open air lock.Chapter 36Friday, June 58:39p.m.Days later, Alexa Hampton was still considering herself one of the luckiest people alive. When she'd regained consciousness the next week in Lenox Hill Hospital, hooked up to oxygen and being fed by an IV, she noticed that the nurses were looking at her strangely and whispering to each other. Finally she couldn't stand it anymore and asked why."It was what you did," a young Puerto Rican woman declared, gazing at her in awe through her rimless glasses. "No one can believe it."Then she explained. What they couldn't believe—as reported by the New Jersey firefighters—was that she had single‑handedly wrenched open the steel‑door air lock of the laboratory at the Dorian Institute. At the time firefighters were on the other side vainly trying to dismantle the door with their axes. Yet she'd just yanked it aside like paper. It was reminiscent of those urban legends of superhuman strength in times of crisis, like the story of a panicked woman who hoisted an overturned Chevy van to free a pinned child. Later, though, some of the New Jersey fire crew went back and looked again. The steel hinges had literally been sheared off. . . .How did she do that? More important, though, symptoms of her stenosis had entirely disappeared and she felt better than ever in her life. The stem cell technology pioneered by Karl Van de Vliet had indeed produced a miracle. She even had a new kind of energy, periodically. It was unlike anything she’d ever felt.Other things were new as well. She’d been seeing a lot of Stone Aimes and helping him finish his book on the Gerex Corporation's successful clinical trials with stem cell technology. After all the publicity following the fire at the Dorian Institute, the manuscript was generating a lot of buzz. A paperback auction was already in the works, with a half‑million floor, and Time had abruptly taken a second look at the "first serial" excerpt his agent had been trying to place with them and come up with six figures. The only part Stone hadn't reported was the ghastly side effect of the early Beta experiment, the Syndrome, because Kristen Starr had disappeared. He had no proof and his publisher refused to print potentially libelous speculation.In the meantime, Winston Bartlett hadn't been seen in public since that tragic day. The business press speculated he had become a Howard Hughes‑like recluse in his Gramercy Park mansion. Ally had tried several times to reach him through his office to find out what he wanted to do about the design job, and each time she was told he would get back to her. He never did.Maybe he was still recuperating. When the firefighters pulled him out of the flaming wreckage, his clothes were singed from the electricity that had coursed through his body, his heart was stopped and he appeared to be dead. In fact, he was dead.The paramedics immediately began intensive CPR. Moments later, his heart was beating again. Then he declared he was well enough that he didn't need to go to a hospital. He had his Japanese henchman, Kenji Noda, help him to his McDonnell Douglas and he disappeared into the night.Oxygen had not been to his brain for . . . No one knew how long. The paramedics said he awoke in what seemed another reality.Was he still alive? There had been no reports otherwise, but he most certainly had withdrawn from the world.Karl Van de Vliet, for his part, had been hospitalized for severe burns. He remained in the trauma unit at St. Vincent's Hospital, but when Alexa tried to go visit him, she was told he wasn't accepting visitors but was doing well. Katherine Starr was dead from a massive concussion, along with the two researchers, Debra Connolly andDavidHopkins, who had been in the wrong place when the steel racks collapsed. And Alexa never been able to find out what happened to Kristen Starr. Officially, nobody by that name was there.But business was business. With the clinical trials over, the pending sale of the Gerex Corporation to Cambridge Pharmaceuticals was proceeding on autopilot, handled by Grant Hampton, who stood to make a bundle or so he bragged to Alexa. The Dorian Institute had been closed and all the remaining records moved to a converted facility near Liverpool.After six days in Lenox Hill, Ally went home, and three days after that she had returned to her desk at CitiSpace. Now, inevitably, she was back to her workaholic habits and grueling hours.
"Ally, you really don't have to see this, you know. Not if you'd rather . . . Nothing remotely like this is going to happen to you. They assured me."
What the hell is he talking about?
"On the other hand," he went on, "maybe you should see it. Maybe everybody in the world should see it. It's so astonishing."
He pushed open the door and rolled her in. Then he reached down and lifted her to her feet. Standing wasn't that hard, and somehow he had known that.
The room seemed to be captured in mist, though surely that was her imagination. Everything must be her imagination.
Kristen was in the corner of the room, in a wheelchair, but now her body was shriveled. No, shriveled was not the right word. In fact, there might not be a word to describe the change. Her skin was smooth and flawless. She didn't look like this the last time Ally saw her and now she wondered how long ago that actually was. How many hours, or days?
The bones were the same as always; in her cheeks the underlying structure was sharp and severe and elegant. But there wasn't enough flesh on them. They were reminiscent of what happens at puberty, when the body starts changing in ways that aren't well coordinated.
That was it. Kristen had become a child—it was in her innocent eyes—except that her body was now the flesh of a child over the bone structure of an adult.
It scarcely seemed like the same person from the last time. She had crossed some mystical divide. She was holding a large rag doll—where did she get that? Ally wondered—and humming the tune of the ditty that ended with "Now I know my ABC's. Tell me what you think of me."
"She can't talk," Stone was saying. "I mean, actually communicate. Or at least she doesn't seem to want to. I've already tried. But isn't what's happened incredible? There's never been anything like this in history. The replacement cells are making her body newer and newer, so she's getting younger and younger."
Ally walked over, slowly, and tried to take her hand. She was grasping the doll and she violently pulled back.
"Hey," she said, trying to muster a matter‑of‑fact air, "how's it going? Do you remember me?"
"I don't think she recognizes you," Stone said in a stage whisper. "I wish I knew more about the biology of the brain, but I think there's some kind of aggressive replacement of memory synapses under way. I think it's one of those LIFO things. Last in/first out. She's regressing chronologically, but in reverse. Maybe she's lost use of language, the way Alzheimer's patients do. I don't know."
Ally felt herself near to tears. "Van de Vliet was going to use antibodies from me to try to . . . something."
"That was always a long shot," he said. "But now the preliminary tests he's just done on you indicate that the level of enzyme in you can be controlled very accurately. He's very excited."
She turned back to him. "How do you know all this?"
"I've become part of the story, Ally. That's not supposed to happen, but this is the only way to get it all firsthand. I have to live it. And guess what, I now know enough to write the book I've been waiting all my life to write. I have the punch line."
"Which is?"
"Stem cell technology goes to the very origin of life, and it may turn out that for once Mother Nature can be fooled. Dr. Vee's venturing into areas now where even he doesn't know what's going on. Ally, what's happening in this room is the biggest medical story since . . . Nothing begins to compare."
Stone had lost it. There was true madness about him now.
She walked back over to Kristen and leaned over and
kissed her. Kristen stared at her in unfocused confusion, but then she smiled.
"I'm alone in here. Will you take me outside? I want to find my mother."
The voice was that of a five‑year‑old and it sent a chill through Alexa. The "grown‑up" memory cells in her brain had been replaced by blanks. It was "last in/first out" and thirty‑plus years of life experience were being replaced with brand‑new nothingness.
The Syndrome. Time had to move in one direction or the other. The body either went forward or in reverse. There was no equilibrium.
Then she had a further thought. Winston Bartlett was not going to let this Beta disaster run to its natural conclusion— a horrifying exposure to the world. He was going to intervene. Kristen was not about to leave this room in her current condition. Either she left cured—which seemed wholly implausible at this point—or she departed in a manner that left no trace.
Then yet another thought crossed her befuddled mind. She and Stone knew about Kristen. What does that mean for us?
"Stone, we can't leave her here."
"What are you proposing we do?" he queried. "Take her to an ER somewhere? Frankly, I don't know how you would describe her problem to an emergency room admissions staffer."
"I'll think of something."
"By the way, Ally, so you should know, she's wearing diapers. This is the real deal."
"And how do you figure in all this?"
"I told you. I'm going to be the James Boswell of stem cell technology. I'm going to report on this miracle from the inside. But now, Ally, if the Beta procedure is going to succeed you have to be the one to make it happen."
She looked at him, still stunned by the wildness in his eyes.
And she had a feeling like her heart was being wrenched out.
"You're working with them, aren't you?" She was fuming with anger. She no longer knew who could be trusted. He'd taken leave of his senses. Or had his senses been taken from him? Which was it?
"I'm thinking about you. And hopefully about us. You're being offered something you'd be a fool to turn down. That's all I have to say." He took her hand and helped her back into the wheelchair. Then he whispered, "Let's get out of here."
He quickly opened the door and rolled her out into the empty hall. When he closed the door behind them, he whispered again. "Didn't you see the surveillance camera and microphone in there? There's one in the room where they had me locked up. They just put them in."
"To watch Kristen?"
"And me. I heard Bartlett and Van de Vliet talking. If any of this Beta screw‑up with her gets out of this building, Bartlett's conglomerate is toast." He bent over near to her and continued whispering. "Listen, we don't have much time. They've got your procedure scheduled for later on tonight. I'm still somewhat of a zombie from something they gave me, but maybe I can help get you out of here. Let me tell you what I've found out so far. Van de Vliet gave you a low‑dosage version of the Beta procedure, in hopes he could harvest telomerase antibodies and use them on Bartlett. But there was only a trace. He did inject those into Bartlett, but he doesn't think it's enough to have any effect. So now Bartlett is demanding he give you a massive dose of telomerase. Van de Vliet is freaked about the risks, but Bartlett thinks it's his only chance to head off having what happened to Kristen happen to him too. However, what Bartlett doesn't know is that Van de Vliet has just finished a new computer simulation and he thinks he's finally figured out how to do a successful Beta procedure. For him, that's the Holy Grail."
"How do you know all this?"
"I heard him talking to his assistant Debra. I was supposed to be sedated. The reason he wants to perform it on you is because he now has so much data on you, as a result of the first procedure. He thinks he's got a real shot at redemption. Ally, if he's calculated wrong, you could end up like Kristen."
"What about you?" she asked. "You should get out too."
"I should, but . . . Look, I've been trying to get in here for a long time. Now I'm finally in. You could say I'm under duress, but I'm here and this is where it's happening. If I get out alive, I have a hell of a story."
Is he thinking clearly? she wondered. He seems to be drifting in and out of a mental cloud. What is wrong with him?
"Stone, there's an emergency door on the first level of the basement. If we can get up there, we might be able to escape. And while we're doing it, you might want to seriously reconsider staying in this place. We've both seen Kristen. What makes you think they're planning on either of us ever living to tell that tale?"
"I'm having some trouble thinking just now." He was helping her out of the wheelchair. "But I do know you've got to disappear. Whatever plans they have for me remain to be seen, but I know exactly what's in store for you. So come on and try to walk. We can't use the elevator, but there's a fire door at the other end of the hall, which leads up to the lab floor."
It's probably alarmed, she thought. Then what do we do?
Walking was easier than she'd expected. The strength was rapidly coming back in her legs. But more than that, there was no sense of tightness in her chest as she might have expected. She was always aware of traces of stenosis, but now she felt nothing. Maybe there were miracles.
The hallway was dimly lit, and she wondered, Is a surveillance camera tracking our every move?
"Shit," Stone announced when they reached the fire door, "it's alarmed."
That's exactly what I was afraid of, she thought.
"Any chance they're bluffing?"
"Don't think so." He pointed. "That little red diode says it's hot."
God, she thought we've got to get out of here. "Maybe we could just make a dash for it?"
He looked at her and shook his head. "Like you're in shape to dash? No, what's called for is stealth."
He was pulling out his wallet. "The thing about these card readers, some of them, like those that get you into bank ATMs, sometimes will open for other cards. I've got four kinds of plastic. Might as well give them a try."
"Well, just hurry." She leaned against the wall. "I'm starting to get weak."
He slipped his Visa through and nothing happened. He immediately tried MasterCard. Again nothing.
"Maybe I should try my all‑purpose bankcard." He slipped a Chase plastic through, but once more nothing happened.
"This isn't working, Stone." She sighed, feeling her legs weaken as she clasped the wall. "I think we're going to have to chance the elevator."
"Don't give up yet." He took out his American Express, kissed it and swiped it through. "One last shot."
The red diode blinked off.
"Never leave home without it," she whispered.
"We will now proceed very, very quietly." He carefully pushed open the door, inches at a time.
The stair had metal steps and was lit by a single fluorescent bulb. As he helped her up, Ally was wondering if there was any way to extract her mother too. She couldn't imagine how she could do it and besides, Nina might well refuse to go.
No, just get out and make Stone understand that no way was Winston Bartlett going to let him go free to tell the story of Kristen. He clearly wasn't thinking with all cylinders.
Stone Aimes was about to disappear, just like Kristen had.
The entry to the laboratory level was also alarmed, but American Express once again saved the day. When they pushed open the door, however, the lights were on in the office at the far end of the hallway.
Where's that door that Grant was going to use to get me out? she wondered. Then she saw a door markedexitnext to Van de Vliet's office.
Shit, it's all the way at the opposite end of the hall.
"Stone, we have to get to that door before anybody sees us. I don't know if it's alarmed or not, but that's the ball game." She reached for his hand. "If we can get there and get out, please come with me. We can make it to the highway. You can't stay here."
"Let's get you out. Then we'll talk."
"I'll drag you if I have to."
As they moved quietly along the wall, they could hear an argument under way. She recognized the voices as Ellen 'Hara's and Karl Van de Vliet's.
"I won't allow my staff to be part of this," Ellen was declaring. "I've seen Kristen. Any form of the Beta is dangerous. If you do anything involving that procedure again, you'll put everybody here at risk."
"Don't you think I've thought about that, agonized about it? We have one chance to turn all this around. This is it."
"I don't want to be involved and I don't want any of my people involved do you hear me?"
"Then keep them upstairs." He was striding out of his office, flipping on the lights in the hallway.
"Oh shit," Ally whispered. She opened a door and pulled Stone into the examining room, where her mother had first been admitted. Just as she did she heard the ding of the elevator and caught a glimpse of Debra andDavidVan de Vliet's senior researchers, getting off.
When she closed the door, the room should have been pitch black. But it wasn't. A candle was burning on a counter and there was a figure at the far end of the room.
He was sitting on the examining table, in the lotus position, his eyes closed.
"Are you ready?" Kenji Noda asked. "I think just about everyone is here now."
Oh my God, Ally thought. What are we going to do?
She watched helplessly as he reached over and touched a button on the desk. A red light popped on above the door. A moment later, it opened.
"What are you doing here?" Debra asked, staring at them.
"Getting some exercise," Stone said.
Then Winston Bartlett appeared in the doorway behind her.
"How did they get up here?"
"Ally, I'm not going to let them do this to you," Stone declared, seizing her hand. "We're going to—"
"Ken, please get him out of here," Bartlett said. 'Take him back downstairs, anywhere."
"You shouldn't be out of your wheelchair," Debra was saying. She turned to Ellen. "Would you get—"
"I'm not getting you anything," Ellen O'Hara declared. "I've just submitted my resignation. Effective three minutes ago. I don't know a thing about what's going on here and, from now on, I don't want to know."
She got on the elevator and the door closed.
"Ken," Bartlett said, "first things first. Go after that woman. Don't let her leave the building."
Now Debra was rolling in a wheelchair.Davidhad appeared also, deep disquiet in his eyes, and he helped her in.
"There's very little risk to this," he said. "Believe me."
She felt him giving her an injection in her left arm.
No, don't . . .
As the room started to spin, she reached out and grabbed Stone’s arm and pulled him down to her.
"Downstairs," she whispered. "Look around. There's—"
She didn't get to finish because Debra was whisking her out the door and toward the laboratory. Stone had just grinned confusedly, seemingly not paying any attention to what she was saying. Instead he ambled toward the open stair door and disappeared.
At this point, however, no one appeared to notice or to care. They were rolling her through the steel air lock. On the other side, Winston Bartlett was already waiting, standing next to a gurney with straps.
No!
Chapter 34
9:34p.m.
She was still conscious asDavidand Debra lifted her onto the gurney. There was no operating table in the laboratory, but this procedure did not require one. It consisted of a series of small subcutaneous injections along both sides of the spine, followed by a larger injection at the base of the skull.
As the injections began, she drifted into a mind‑set where she was never entirely sure how much was real, how much was fantasy, how much deliberate, how much accidental. She remembered that she felt her grasp of reality slipping away, but there was no sense of pain. Instead, images and sensations in a sequence that corresponded to the passage of time drifted through her mind. It was couched in terms of the people she knew.
The first image was her mother, Nina, and they were together, struggling through a dense forest Initially, she thought they were looking for her father's grave, but then it became clear they were searching for some kind of magic potion that would save her mother’s life. As they clawed their way through tangled tendrils and dark arbors, she became increasingly convinced their quest was doomed, that she was destined to watch Nina pass into oblivion.
But then something happened. The forest opened out onto a vast meadow bathed in sunshine. In the center was a cluster of snow‑white mushrooms, and she knew instinctively that these would bring eternal life to anyone who ate them.
"Come," she said to Nina, "these can save you."
"Ally, I'm too old now. I don't want to be saved. There comes a moment in your life when you've done everything you feel you needed to do. You've had the good times and now all that's left is the slow deterioration of what's left of your body. It robs the joy out of living."
"No, Mom, this is different," she said plucking one of the white mushrooms and holding it out. "This prevents you from growing any older. You'll stay just the way you are. You can have a miracle."
“'To never escape this vale of tears? To watch everyone you love grow old and wither and die? Is that the 'miracle' you want me to have?" Then she looked up at the flawless blue sky and held out her arms as though to embrace the sun. "My mind Ally. You've given me back my mind. Now I can live out whatever more life God will see fit to give me and actually know who I am and where I am. That's miracle enough for me."
As she said it, a beam of white light came directly from the sun and enveloped her. Then the meadow around them faded away and all she could see was Karl Van de Vliet, who was bending over her and lifting back her eyelids.
"Alexa, I can't tell you what you're about to feel, because no one has ever been where you're about to be. God help us, but we're on the high wire without a net here. But any new cell configurations should immediately form tissue that's a facsimile of what's already there. That's what the simulations show."
She was listening to him, not sure if he was real or a dream. Then she heard Bartlett's voice.
"Why are you talking to her, Karl? She can't hear you."
"We don't actually know whether she can or not. At some level I think she's aware of her surroundings. In a way we should hope that she is. If there are going to be impacts on her consciousness, I'd rather she be alert and able to remember what it was like."
Then the voices drifted away, but she was sure she had no control over anything. The white mushrooms. She was thinking about them again. Only now they were above her and growing toward the sky and then she realized she was underground, buried and looking up from her own grave.
What happened next was a journey through time—somewhere in the far‑distant future. She seemed to be watching it through a large window, unable to interact with what was happening on the other side.
Time.
She felt a sensation at the back of her neck and the images faded away.
"This damned well better be right" came a voice. "There's not going to be another chance."
"I did an activity simulation for a range of antibodies, just to make sure she wouldn't automatically reject the enzyme because of the earlier injection." The voice belonged to Karl Van de Vliet Her mind was clearing and she recognized it "But all the results indicate that the effect of the antibodies is essentially washed out at this concentration of active enzyme. Have the good grace to let me try to get this right."
She was listening and trying to understand what was going on. Her mind had been drifting through time and space, but now she was aware that something new was happening. The hallucinations, the conversations around her, all were beginning to focus in, to build in intensity.
But that was not what was really happening; it was merely a mask over something that had entered the laboratory, some kind of force.
Then her vision began to work in a strange way that felt more like a sixth sense. She was "seeing" what was going on in the room, even though her eyes were shut. Or perhaps they weren't. She didn't know and she was still strapped to the gurney, so she had no way to check.
"Kristy," Winston Bartlett said dismay in his voice, "you shouldn't be in here. You should be resting."
"What the hell are you doing down here?" Van de Vliet demanded. The pitch of his voice had noticeably gone up.
Who? Ally wondered. Who's he talking to?
There are definitely new people in the room.
"Come on, Ally," said a voice in her ear, urgent. This time she knew who it was. It was Stone. "Damn them all. I'm getting you out of here. Now."
Chapter 35
10:07p.m.
She felt the straps on the gurney loosening and then she started prying her eyes open. She thought, hoped, it was Stone, but she couldn't see well enough to be absolutely sure. Her mind and her vision were still overflowing with horrifying nightmares of time gone awry. What did all those bizarre dreams mean?
She was groggy but was coming alert. Perhaps it was the sense of electricity in the room, but something very unscheduled was going on.
When she finally got her eyes open and focused, what greeted her was a blinding row of white lights directly overhead that seemed to isolate her. But there was tumult all around her in the lab, a cacophony of alarmed voices echoing off the hard surfaces of glass and steel. She squinted into the light as she felt Stone slip his arm around her shoulders and raise her up.
Thank God, he's here, she thought.
"Come on," he was saying. "She's not interested in you. She just wants Kristen out of here. This is the only way."
"Who . . . ?" She was startled by the sound of her own voice, mildly surprised to discover she was even capable of speech.
She gazed around, trying to find her when . . . Jesus!
Katherine Starr was standing next to Kristen. She was moving in a surreal way, gripping Kristen's hand and pulling her along.
Stone had found her. He had understood. Katherine Starr appeared to be wearing a blue bathrobe under a gray mackintosh, but the part that got Ally's attention was the knife she was holding, glistening like a scalpel.
No, itwasa scalpel, shiny and sharp as a razor.
Tough luck, guys. No pistol this time, but she still managed to come up with a convincing substitute.
She didn't look any saner than she did the last time. Now, though, she finally had what she'd come for. She had her daughter. Could it be that Kristen was about to be liberated? Had the world come full circle?
"No." The voice belonged to Winston Bartlett. "I want her with me."
"You 're the prick responsible for this." Katherine whirled on him, brandishing the scalpel.
"Mrs. Starr," Van de Vliet interjected, eyeing the sharp metal, "you can't take Kristen away now. She's at a very delicate stage of her procedure."
"I seem to be doing a lot of things I can't," she declared turning back. "I'm not supposed to be out of my room, but I am. And now I'm getting us both out of here. We're going through that air lock and onto the elevator. So whose throat do I need to cut to do it?"
Winston Bartlett was edging away, and his eyes betrayed he was more concerned than he wished to appear.
"Look at her," Katherine Starr continued shoving Kristen— who was completely disoriented her eyes blinking in confusion—in front of Van de Vliet. "She doesn't know me; she doesn't know anything. She's acting like a baby. What in hell have you done to her?"
"She had the procedure she wanted. At the time I warned there might be side effects we couldn't anticipate."
"She's lost her mind. That's what you call aside effect?”
All this time Kristen was just standing and staring blankly into space, but there were growing storm clouds welling in her eyes. It caused Ally to wonder what was really going on with her. Had this troubled girl been made permanently childlike, or was there a split personality at work? Did she have a new mind now, or a parallel mind?
"We're still trying to stabilize her condition," Van de Vliet said in a soothing tone. "We just need a little more time."
That was when Kristen wrenched free of her mother's grasp. Her eyes had just gone critical, traveling into pure madness. She strode over and seized a glass jar containing a clear solvent.
"I want them all to die," she said in a little girl's voice. "They're going to kill me if I don't kill them first."
Now Katherine Starr had turned and was staring at her. "Kristy, honey, put the bottle down. I'm going to take you home. I don't know what he's done to you, but I'm not going to let you stay here anymore. You're coming with me."
This is not going to end well, Ally thought. She began struggling to her feet, trying to clear her mind enough for an exit strategy.
Nina was upstairs, or at least that was where she had been. Okay, the first order of business is to get her out. Stone could probably manage on his own . . .
Now Kristen was walking over to an electric heater positioned on a lab workbench. She switched it on and the tungsten elements immediately began to glow. Then, still holding the bottle, she turned back to Van de Vliet.
"I see things that I never saw before. My mind has powers it never had till now."
He nodded knowingly. "I always suspected that—"
"I'm able to think just like I did when I was little," she continued, cutting him off. "Sometimes I'm there, in that
world. Then sometimes I flip back. But I can always tell when grown‑ups are lying to me. What did you do to my mind?"
"Kristen," Van de Vliet said "the brain has many functions that we still only barely understand. With the Beta procedure, we don't really know what activates general cell replacement or what the nature of the replacement tissue actually is. We're just at the beginning of a marvelous—"
"I'm seeing a future in which nothing exists," she muttered despairingly, still holding the glass bottle of solvent. "I don't want to be a part of it."
Van de Vliet was staring at her, his eyes flooded with alarm. "What . . . what are you seeing, Kristen?"
"I'm seeing you dead." She glared around "All of you."
Then, with an animal scream, she whirled and flung the glass liter bottle at the electric heater on the laboratory workbench. It crashed into the shiny steel case with a splintering sound followed by an explosion that sent a ball of fire and a shock wave through the room. In an instant the entire end of the lab was engulfed in a sea of flame.
Ally sensed herself being knocked to the floor, but she also felt a surge of adrenaline. This was endgame, the moment when everybody found out who they were.
A hand was gripping her like a vise. It was Stone's, but the blast had knocked him to the floor too and he was now motionless, slumped against the side of a laboratory bench. It was like she was being held in a death grip. Was she going to have to carry him out? She wasn't even sure she had the strength in her legs to get herself out.
Now something even more horrible was slowly beginning to happen. The central part of the lab had several sets of steel shelving arranged in rows, and each supported a carefully organized arrangement of sample vials filled with some kind of organic solvent. She saw with horror that the first towering set of shelves, easily seven feet high, was slowly tipping from the force of the blast. It teetered for an instant and then fell into the set of shelves next to it with all the ponderous majesty of a giant sequoia.
What happened next sounded like the end of the world. As the first set of shelves crashed against the second, like a row of massive steel‑and‑glass dominoes, each subsequent tower tipped and fell against the next, and on and on.
All the while, as the tumbling racks were spewing flammable solvents across the smoky lab space, they were ripping out electrical wiring and sending sparks flying.
The whole danger‑dynamic of the room had been turned upside down. Katherine Starr and Debra andDavidnow lay pinned beneath a tangled mass of angle‑iron supports that had collapsed in the wake of the falling shelves. All three appeared to be unconscious.
Winston Bartlett was at the far end of the room. He'd been slammed against the wall by the force of the explosion but was pulling himself up. He seemed to be unhurt, though it was hard to see through the billowing smoke.
Karl Van de Vliet was standing in the middle of the laboratory, his eyes glazed, flames and smoke swirling about him.
What does this mean to him? Ally wondered. Years of research data being obliterated in an instant.
But the horror wasn't over. The fire was depleting the hermetically sealed room's oxygen. Ally sensed that anybody who didn't get out of the lab in the next five minutes wasn't going to be going anywhere standing up.
But what was happening with Kristen? She was walking through the flames as though on a country stroll. It was like the fires of hell were all around her and she was ambling through them unscathed. She must be experiencing third‑degree burns, Ally thought, yet there’s a sense that nothing can harm her. How could it be?
And then an astonishing possibility began to dawn on her. With the stem cell enzymes working at full blast, was it possible her body was immediately replacing its damaged cells? Could it be that the telomerase enzyme didn't know the difference between a cell that had aged and one that had been damaged by its environment?
"Jesus," Stone said, finally stirring, "what's—"
At that moment the overhead lights flickered and died and the emergency lights clicked on, sending battery‑powered beams through the smoke.
"Christ, Ally," he declared gazing around still dazed as his consciousness seemed to be slowly returning. "We've got to get people out of here."
There didn't appear to be a sprinkler system. Probably, she thought, because an onslaught of water would wipe out all the computers.
Now she was thinking about the automatic air locks. How did those steel‑and‑glass doors work without electricity? Did they have a battery backup, or some kind of fail‑safe mechanism, which provided a manual override in case of a power outage?
Now Winston Bartlett was striding toward the center of the room. From the dazed look in his eyes, it wasn't clear whether he knew where he was or not. Kristen was walking toward him, on a collision course.
"You let this happen," she said "You wanted to ruin my life."
"Kristy, nobody made you do anything," he said choking from the smoke. "But now we've got to—"
"It's too late," she declared lashing out with the side of her hand against his neck. He staggered back, flailing, and seized an iron girder.
There was a blast of voltage, a shower of sparks, and he screamed as he crumpled sideways. Then the force of his fall broke his hand loose from the electrical short. He lay prostrate on the smoky floor of the lab, twitching.
My God, Ally thought, she really is determined to kill us all before she's through.
"Kristen," Van de Vliet was saying, "please. There's still time. I'm going to do everything I can for you."
He was gasping for air and now more vials of flammable liquid were exploding from the heat and igniting. He turned and stumbled toward the air lock. There were sounds of yelling on the other side.
The people outside can't get through, Ally realized. The security lock has no override.
We 're going to die.
Van de Vliet pounded on the button controls of the air lock, but there was no response. Smoke was billowing around him and he choked, coughing and dropping to one knee.
Then Kristen walked up behind him. She appeared not to notice the flames and smoke swirling around her.
"This is where you get what's coming, you bastard. I warned you you'd better do something for me. But you never really intended to help me. I was just an experiment. That's all I ever was. For both of you. You fuckers." And she lashed out with a powerful fist, sending him to the floor.
Outside there was now the wail of a siren, the sound faintly filtering through. And the pounding on the other side of the air lock continued, though now it had the force of authority.
At last, Ally thought, somebody finally got serious and called the fire department.
Now Kristen had bent over the prostrate Van de Vliet and was doing something, though Ally couldn't tell what.
"Keep your face close to the floor," Stone was yelling. "It's where the last of the air is. Hang on. We'll be okay."
She had a premonition they were not going to be okay. They all were going to suffocate.
All, that was, except Kristen. She seemed to possess some magic immunity from the horrors around her. She had risen and was standing over Van de Vliet like a statue, while everybody else was on the floor.
As Ally watched her—a serene figure in the middle of chaos and death—she began to have an odd sensation. The burning in her lungs, from the smoke, started to dissipate. And strength felt like it was pouring into her limbs. The tongues of flame around her had become dancing white figures that invited her to rise and join them.
She did, slowly, not quite knowing what she was doing. Then she walked to the jammed air lock. She stepped over Karl Van de Vliet's collapsed frame and placed her hands on the steel. It was already scalding, but she only took fleeting notice of that.
While a firefighter's ax futilely pounded on the outside, she seized the wide bar of the door and ripped it open, to the sound of wrenching metal.
It was a superhuman effort she didn't realize she was capable of. And it was the last thing she remembered. The space around her had become a blazing white cloud and she didn't feel the hands of the two firefighters who seized her as she fell through the open air lock.
Chapter 36
Friday, June 5
8:39p.m.
Days later, Alexa Hampton was still considering herself one of the luckiest people alive. When she'd regained consciousness the next week in Lenox Hill Hospital, hooked up to oxygen and being fed by an IV, she noticed that the nurses were looking at her strangely and whispering to each other. Finally she couldn't stand it anymore and asked why.
"It was what you did," a young Puerto Rican woman declared, gazing at her in awe through her rimless glasses. "No one can believe it."
Then she explained. What they couldn't believe—as reported by the New Jersey firefighters—was that she had single‑handedly wrenched open the steel‑door air lock of the laboratory at the Dorian Institute. At the time firefighters were on the other side vainly trying to dismantle the door with their axes. Yet she'd just yanked it aside like paper. It was reminiscent of those urban legends of superhuman strength in times of crisis, like the story of a panicked woman who hoisted an overturned Chevy van to free a pinned child. Later, though, some of the New Jersey fire crew went back and looked again. The steel hinges had literally been sheared off. . . .
How did she do that? More important, though, symptoms of her stenosis had entirely disappeared and she felt better than ever in her life. The stem cell technology pioneered by Karl Van de Vliet had indeed produced a miracle. She even had a new kind of energy, periodically. It was unlike anything she’d ever felt.
Other things were new as well. She’d been seeing a lot of Stone Aimes and helping him finish his book on the Gerex Corporation's successful clinical trials with stem cell technology. After all the publicity following the fire at the Dorian Institute, the manuscript was generating a lot of buzz. A paperback auction was already in the works, with a half‑million floor, and Time had abruptly taken a second look at the "first serial" excerpt his agent had been trying to place with them and come up with six figures. The only part Stone hadn't reported was the ghastly side effect of the early Beta experiment, the Syndrome, because Kristen Starr had disappeared. He had no proof and his publisher refused to print potentially libelous speculation.
In the meantime, Winston Bartlett hadn't been seen in public since that tragic day. The business press speculated he had become a Howard Hughes‑like recluse in his Gramercy Park mansion. Ally had tried several times to reach him through his office to find out what he wanted to do about the design job, and each time she was told he would get back to her. He never did.
Maybe he was still recuperating. When the firefighters pulled him out of the flaming wreckage, his clothes were singed from the electricity that had coursed through his body, his heart was stopped and he appeared to be dead. In fact, he was dead.
The paramedics immediately began intensive CPR. Moments later, his heart was beating again. Then he declared he was well enough that he didn't need to go to a hospital. He had his Japanese henchman, Kenji Noda, help him to his McDonnell Douglas and he disappeared into the night.
Oxygen had not been to his brain for . . . No one knew how long. The paramedics said he awoke in what seemed another reality.
Was he still alive? There had been no reports otherwise, but he most certainly had withdrawn from the world.
Karl Van de Vliet, for his part, had been hospitalized for severe burns. He remained in the trauma unit at St. Vincent's Hospital, but when Alexa tried to go visit him, she was told he wasn't accepting visitors but was doing well. Katherine Starr was dead from a massive concussion, along with the two researchers, Debra Connolly andDavidHopkins, who had been in the wrong place when the steel racks collapsed. And Alexa never been able to find out what happened to Kristen Starr. Officially, nobody by that name was there.
But business was business. With the clinical trials over, the pending sale of the Gerex Corporation to Cambridge Pharmaceuticals was proceeding on autopilot, handled by Grant Hampton, who stood to make a bundle or so he bragged to Alexa. The Dorian Institute had been closed and all the remaining records moved to a converted facility near Liverpool.
After six days in Lenox Hill, Ally went home, and three days after that she had returned to her desk at CitiSpace. Now, inevitably, she was back to her workaholic habits and grueling hours.